


why can't it be like that, 'cause i'm yours...

by oftheseaside



Category: Little Mix (Band)
Genre: F/F, Implied Perry Edwards/Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Jesy Nelson/Harry James
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 10:26:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15337887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oftheseaside/pseuds/oftheseaside
Summary: Everyone gets a mark on their skin once they hit puberty --- a tattoo of their soulmate’s name. While Jade is ecstatic about hers, Leigh-Anne is terrified of her ink.





	why can't it be like that, 'cause i'm yours...

**Author's Note:**

> As a disclaimer, this is, in no way, affiliated with Little Mix. While some aspects of this fic has been taken off the info from their autobiography, Our World, this is a fully-fictional depiction of some events of their lives.

> _Puberty is a special milestone in a person’s life. While it’s difficult for some, due to the changes that the phase entails, to others, it brings excitement, thrill, and, above all, surprise, especially as the event not only marks the beginning of one’s journey towards adulthood, but also the day that one’s soulmate is revealed._
> 
> _The process is easy enough. Like all other changes that occur in the human body during this phase, it’s natural. On the day that marks the beginning of puberty, an inked tattoo of the name of one’s soulmate shall appear on a random strip of their skin._
> 
> _The way it starts is mostly the same for everyone. What happens afterwards, however, is how every story differs from others…_

 

 

**Burn**

_hit me hard and i don't know what to say..._

Leigh-Anne gets her mark on a day she has planned to go out with friends. What is supposed to be a morning interrupted by the loud ringing of her alarm clock is instead started by a burning feeling on her torso.

She jolts awake, wincing, as she throws the blanket off her body, worried that she might have gotten injured in her sleep. What she finds, instead, as she lifts the fabric of her top, is gray ink fading onto her skin, one letter at a time, scripting the name of who is supposed to be the other half of her soul.

Immediately, she runs to her mirror, watching her reflection as the letters appear right beneath her chest, curved along the ribs on her left side. One stroke at a time, the mirrored letters write itself in tiny but neat scrawl --- the handwriting of her supposed soulmate. And she smiles in between grimaces of pain, already finding this boy to be very interesting as to have a cute handwriting.

Only, she discovers, soon after, that she is mistaken. As the burning sensation ends after four letters, the breath she is holding puffs out in a nervous exhale.

She has two sisters, both having gotten their marks a few days after their thirteenth birthday, tattoos of untidy scrawls of boys’ names on their hips.

And she wonders why she got a _girl’s_ name instead.

Soon, however, the wonder turns into anxiety until, finally, after an encounter she walks into in the bathroom, the anxiety morphs into fear.

There’s another girl, cornered in one of the stalls, being kicked and insulted by a group of other girls because of the name tattooed on her skin, the term _dyke_ flying around like arrows meant to hurt her more than the physical wounds do. And as Leigh runs away, throwing the doors open violently, her heart beating out of her chest as her hands shake, she decides that no one should ever see her soulmate’s name inked across her skin.

From then on, she avoids any girl called _Jade._

 

 

**Mesmerize**

_i remember feeling so high..._

As she’s several months younger than most of her classmates, Jade gets her soulmate ink almost a full year after everyone else in her class has.

While everyone chattered on and discussed their tattoos, she remained by a corner, quiet and with no experiences to share yet. Despite her usual indifference to gossip, she finds herself gnawing at her nails for the day she can finally have a reason to smile and be excited about.

It’s summer vacation when Jade gets her mark. It’s just an ordinary day that she spends down the street at her granda’s house. She’s in the middle of a banter with her older brother when she stops amidst a thought, halting her words as pain strikes across her right hip.

Her brother is there, watching with a concerned look on his face when she lifts the hem of her shirt, tugging the waistband of her trousers to reveal the name slowly etching itself on her skin. She’s nervous, her heart feels as though it’s about to jump out of her chest as she watches the upside-down letters. It takes a while, the name appearing one stroke at a time. And as she waits with bated breath, she wracks her mind for boy names beginning with the letters _Lei_.

It’s on her brother’s tongue, however, that she first hears the beautiful name. No, it’s not likely to be a boy’s name, and her brother says so himself. His head is tilted to the side, a smile playing on his lips after he’s read the name. “Well, that’s absolutely a much classier name than _Poopey_ ,” he teases. “It’s all proper and posh-like.”

Not two hours later, and her parents already know. It becomes a topic of conversation during dinner, her father giving her _The Talk_ on how she should not let this distract her from her education and living out the rest of her young life, how, at her age, she should wait for her path to cross with her soulmate’s, instead of actively looking. Her mam, however, is already telling her that as soon as she meets the lovely girl, she must introduce her to the family.

They’re all _insane_ , she thinks fondly. She’s thirteen, it’s not as though she’s about to get married. That thought is still very far from her young mind. But she cannot deny, as her lips pull up in a smile, a twinkle settling in her eyes, she’s excited to talk to her friends, and to anyone willing to listen, about how pretty the name _Leigh-Anne_ is.

It might have taken a while for her mark to finally grace her body, but she believes it’s well worth all the bloody wait.

 

 

**Hope**

_i wanna change my mind..._

It must be the fact that she’s the youngest of three sisters. Hence, the milestone has already happened twice before. Safe to say that by the time she’s turned fourteen, her body still not quite that of a woman’s, but a third box of tampons have already made it to their shopping list almost a year prior, it’s only a matter of time before someone asks about it.

Sian is the one that pops the question one afternoon when she comes over for a visit, and the moment it is asked, fear flashes upon Leigh-Anne’s features, the traumatizing incidents she has witnessed at school playing in the back of her mind.

Worry blooms on her eldest sister’s features when she takes too long to answer. And maybe it’s the fact that she hasn’t gotten to talk to anyone about it, or maybe it’s the fear and confusion, or maybe it’s the fact that Sian has long moved out and stayed with her own soulmate, and their parents have just split, _dad_ taking Sairah with him, making her feel very much alone, she’s not truly sure. But eventually, whatever it is, it coaxes her to speak up.

It’s amazing how bright the world can become once more as soon as dark grey clouds are swept away from hiding the sun. Just like that, with one mere afternoon with Sian, the older, more experienced sister lending ears to listen to Leigh talk about her fears, and providing her wise words to guide her, a heavy weight is lifted from her shoulders. Suddenly, once more, there is hope for Leigh-Anne.

Sian must have told their mum, too, because soon enough, she’s also getting support from her, being told that it doesn’t matter that her soulmate is also a girl. What matters is that she has someone she can fit perfectly with one day, a person she can have a happier story than the one that her parents have shared.

Soon after, she finds the courage to stop actively hiding her mark. While people still can’t read all of it due to its intimate location, she’s stopped fearing an accidental slip while changing in the girls’ locker room.

And the bullying of those whose marks are clearly that of the same gender’s name? It stops once she’s become Prefect. By the time she’s a Senior Prefect, no one dares give anyone shit about the identity of their soulmates.

Three months before her fifteenth birthday, she meets her first friend named _Jade_.

Ten months after her fifteenth birthday, almost a year after she and her friend, Jade, found out for certain that they’re not soulmates, Leigh-Anne meets her first boyfriend, the boy of her first kiss, her first love, her first everything.

 

 

**Tether**

_never held me in my darkest hours..._

Things don’t remain easy for too long. Soon, reasons for Jade to forget about the excitement her soul-mark has brought her present themselves. The bullying begins once all her friends have moved schools. And while she remains active in her love of the performing arts outside of school, keeping up a positive attitude through it all, life at school begins to spiral down.

Somehow, for whatever reason she cannot fathom, she’s become the target of the ire of the group of popular girls at her school, with one girl particularly having it out for her. At first, she opts to ignore it, continuing with her studies as if it’s not a big deal. However, it eventually gets so much worse to the point that she’s being ganged up on, held down as she’s beaten and called names. So much worse that suddenly, even just the thought of going back to school terrifies her.

Thankfully, the bullying incident is rectified as soon as her mam finds out, comes to school and fixes it. But that problem has not even been solved for too long when another problem arrives.

Her _granda_ dies, and the grief it brings begins to poison her life.

Anorexia and depression, separately, are very destructive. But one brought by the other and eventually settling atop the other is much more dangerous. As time passes and she feels less and less in control of her life as it spirals down, feeling like there’s nothing she can do as she watches her life topple over one domino at a time, she starts to believe that the only control she can have is over her own body.  

As her eating habits get worse and worse, her body getting thinner and thinner, she grapples for as much control over her life as she could. And in the process, the train of thought she has whenever she stands in front of a mirror, her brown gaze falling on the name _Leigh-Anne_ tattooed on her skin, becomes a roller-coaster ride. Over time, switching from one to the other, she sometimes sees that mark as a ray of hope, a lifeline to hold on to, a promise that one day, someone would be able to understand what she’s going through, a person who can help her clean up the mess that her life is becoming. Other days, she looks at it with anger twisting her features, seeing it as another evidence that nothing in her life is truly under her control – not even the person she is to belong with.

Time passes, and life gets so much worse until there’s no longer a roller coaster taking her on a confusing ride through loops of every direction. Soon, her life is back on a train, and it derails inside a dark tunnel.

The lifeline that the name _Leigh-Anne_ had once been is snipped, her suffering distorting the hope it once brought, breaking the promise of a future that it had been before. All the goodness it held before now morphs into a curse until she sees it as nothing more than another evidence that nothing in her life could go right. And as her life gets darker, hatred blooms in her heart, hatred for her soulmate for not arriving in her life to shed some light on it, for not coming to save her when she needs her the most.

Soon, the tether of hope is snipped.  

 

 

**Cover**

_once you owned my heart..._

Getting into a relationship with someone that’s not your soulmate is not very uncommon. It’s for various reasons that people do it. In the case of Leigh-Anne’s parents, they fell in love with each other, gotten married and tried to stay together despite not being each other’s soulmates due to the mere fact that they thought they could defy _destiny._ For others, it’s simply because they wanted to gain more experience, to become better people through these relationships, so that once their other halves arrive, they’ll be more equipped to run after their happily-ever-after’s.

In Leigh-Anne’s case, it starts as the latter, thinking a fling or two is not too bad an idea. After all, she’s a young woman. She can have fun, she can experience life the way it should be experienced, can live in the moment instead of focusing all the time on the future far in the horizon. But eventually, it shifts and turns into the former.

It’s a happy relationship for the first two years. Though he’s not her soulmate – a fact that he does not find out until much later as she covers up her tattoo with make-up and never brings up that kind of topic in conversations while she’s not ready yet – he does all the right things at the right time to make her fall head over heels in love with him. He’s thoughtful, caring, and just the perfect boyfriend that Leigh-Anne thinks that maybe they’re among the small percentage of couples who end up being happy together despite not being soulmates.

For three years, this boy makes her forget all about Jade.

Her assumed happy-ever-after, however, spirals down on the third Valentine’s day that they spend together. As tradition dictates, she books a room in a special hotel somewhere to celebrate the date, with a romantic dinner complete with flower petals on the bed, candle-light dinner, taking on that role this time after her boyfriend has been doing it for the past two years. 

The dinner happens properly and romantically enough without any hitches. It’s when she’s laying on her back, her lips swollen from all the kissing, his eyes bearing into her lust-filled ones as he tugs her bra down, that her mark is revealed, no make-up covering the name inked on her skin. The moment his gaze falls on the name that is not his, the look on his face changes as if he’s just been slapped.

Confusion soon takes over his features, but morphs into that of pain and the look of betrayal as he turns the side of his head towards her direction. Sweeping his shaggy locks aside and flattening the back of his ear, he shows her the name of his soulmate. Right there, written on the skin at the back of his helix is the name _Leigh_.

It’s not Leigh-Anne’s handwriting, the fact brings a pang to her heart painful enough to knock her breath off her lungs. Just like he isn’t her soulmate, naturally, she isn’t his. What hurts is that this whole time, the way he has been with her is because he thought she is his.

Fear comes knocking, bringing a tremble to her hands as she reaches for him. Pleas of, _“This doesn’t change anything, does it? It doesn’t matter if we’re not soulmates,”_ and _“We’re perfect together. I love you, and you love me. That’s what matters, right?”_ tumbling down her quivering lips.

He reaches for her hands several beats too long, his fingers loose as they entwine with hers. They make love that night, but it’s not the same as all the other times they’ve done so before. Leigh-Anne isn’t even sure she can call it _making love_ with how detached it is.

In the coming months, she stubbornly thinks she could be _Leigh_. After all, what certainty could they have that she’s not his soulmate? Her name is _Leigh_ -Anne, anyway. A person’s handwriting could change through time. If she’s not yet his _Leigh_ now, then she can certainly work on being that woman as time passes by, right? She wants it to work so badly, afraid of losing this relationship she’s given so much of herself into, that she tries to keep the ship from sinking at the expense of her own emotions. While he starts to drift away, no longer the man she fell in love with, she tries to hold on tight. Until time comes when she no longer could.

A couple more years later is what finally ends it. Looking back on it as she sits on the fragments of her broken heart, bitterness still coating her fingers as she refuses to throw out the broken shards and move on, she realizes she should have known that those signs marked the end of her happiness.

Fear becomes a steady companion whenever her eyes fall on the letters inked on her skin, its lines reminding her of the expression on her ex-boyfriend’s face when he saw it. It’s such a horrible nightmare that there comes a time when she can no longer look at it without feeling like she wants to throw up, so she’s pushed to do something she never thought she would do, a decision that in the years to come, she will end up regretting.

She enters a tattoo parlour, and by the time she exits, in place of where the name _Jade_ used to be, now sits a freshly-tattooed line of flowers curling along her ribs, styled in a way that masks the letters that used to sit there.

 

 

**Salvation**

_i'm right back at the start..._

Light isn’t gone forever, it seems. Thankfully, Jade is given the chance to pull herself out of the pit that she’s fallen into. It takes seeing her life falling apart through the eyes of her family, watching how her destruction is also ruining her parents, breaking her brother’s heart, and making them all think what’s happening to her is their fault, for her to realize she has _got_ to stop.

It takes a while, and full recovery takes time too. But she eventually gets the strength to halt in her walk backwards and start taking steps onwards once more.

Whilst on her road to recovery is when she meets her first boyfriend, the first person to make her challenge fate.

The affair starts playful enough. She’s sixteen, the hardships she’s gone through at a young age postponing that aspect of her life. And she thinks, it’s about time she’s had some fun.

However, while it starts off playfully enough, just a relationship to pass the time, a guy to take her out on dates and help her experience most of her firsts, as it’s her first relationship ever, it isn’t too surprising to her that she invests more into it than her boyfriend does. This is what becomes her undoing.

Apparently, because they both know and have both been open about the truth that they’re not each other’s soulmates, it’s given the man the excuse not to take her too seriously, to not commit to her the same level that she has.

She finds out what’s happening from her boyfriend’s childhood friend, the girl unable to keep shtum about the cheating that her best friend is pulling. She catches him with this other girl she’s noticed him ogling once or twice at the pub down the road. And it’s the fact that _he_ dumps her after she’s the one that’s caught him cheating, reasoning that they were just meant to fool around and it’s her problem if she does not know how to not be _clingy,_ that helps her be certain that he does not deserve having her at all.

It won’t be a complete lie, then, if she says that her next move of getting together with her ex’s best friend a couple of months later is done to mess with him. But it won’t be the complete truth either as she’s quite lovely, and Jade is more than lucky to have her as her first girlfriend, her first decent relationship wherein they both know they’re not each other’s soulmates, but it never becomes an excuse to cheat on each other or treat the other as merely a pastime.

The only reason this relationship does not last is because the girl finally meets her soulmate, and really... who is Jade to stand in the way of destiny? While she would have fought for the relationship if it were the right thing to do, she knows that this time, the right move is to step aside.

There’s just something in the way that she notices her girlfriend’s eyes twinkle the moment her eyes settled upon her soulmate’s. And though guilt soon replaces it once she remembers she’s with Jade, the longing remains glimmering underneath the surface, and instead of anger or jealousy blooming in Jade’s heart at the sight, she feels a decisiveness she’s never felt before, as if right then and there, she could make a decision that she will not regret.

She ends the relationship very soon after that, not postponing the talk for too long. And instead of emptiness or heartbreak being left at the wake of the break up, there’s only hope churning in her chest. That night, she feels a phantom burn on her right hip, as if the name itself is reminding her of its existence on her body, and she sighs, recalling the way that awe lined her ex-girlfriend’s features.

She’s eighteen by then, only months away from the third audition on X-Factor that would change the rest of her life, and all she could wonder then is if she would get the same look of awe in her eyes once she finally meets her _Leigh-Anne._

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a one-shot, but I lost control of the story and the length got away from me, leading me to cut them into several chapters. I'm still unsure how many there will be, it will probably be under five.


End file.
